There's a lot I can say about having a career as a game designer for 25+ years. But one thing I can say is:

During that span and including work at SEVEN different companies, only TWO had a 401(k) plan and only ONE had matching, during the time I was an employee.

I think the landscape has and is continuing to change, but retirement planning and funding is still, IMO, a huge gap in the game development industry. Most folks I know who are 15+ years in haven't had the opportunity or help to save much of anything for retirement.

Sometimes in game dev, the only path to any retirement funding at all seems to be owning your own studio. Even many of the devs I know with 15+ years AND significant hits still probably wouldn't have enough to retire based on what they have so far contributed to accounts.

I should add that any kind of meaningful (e.g. more than one month's salary) profit-sharing or bonuses were often promised and rarely received. Before I was an exec (which has a different pay structure), I think I only got a meaningful bonus once, and never profit-sharing.

People tend to think about our industry as what happens at top-tier, AAA, large game companies like EA, Riot, Blizzard, and even acquired shops like Treyarch. But the engine of the game dev economy is in independent third-party studios. That was where I spent most of my time.

But third-party studios are all too often scrappy, sometimes even desperate to survive. They're also often at the mercy of the publisher because sometimes you get back-end returning revenue and sometimes you don't. Sometimes you have to eat a lot of cost just to ship the game.

So owners of independent studios sometimes see obligations like explicit bonus or rev-share promises as dangerous because they can't predict a future state of profitability. And 401(k) matching sounds like something they'll do "once we're successful."

Lack of retirement funds is also an issue in game dev simply because it's rare for anyone to stick with it long enough to retire. And when you're 20-ish or 30-ish, you don't usually have "good retirement planning and matched 401(k)" on your must-have list when interviewing.

Another factor is that game dev traditionally has been in some of the most expensive cities in terms of cost of living: LA, Seattle, San Francisco. The pay is enough to live OK but not enough to have much left over to squirrel away.

Being at Microsoft has been a constant "OMG what is this?" experience around benefits, stock, and retirement planning. It's so funny to be almost 56 years old and be a total newbie to many of the concepts and tools and offerings because I never, ever encountered them before here.